The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet's: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else.
Al Pacino deserves a great big hand for his performance in the Glengarry Glen Ross revival. Whether he was aware of it or not, in some lip-smacking press coverage he was the victim of quite a pre-opening drubbing for deficient preview performances.
Caught my old friend Billy Joe Shaver's gig last week at New York's "Hill Country." What a hoot. Shear down-home grit, grin, groan and guzzle, Texas style. Only thing missing was the chicken wire.
It is not uncommon to read about huge deficits and cancelled seasons. Not surprisingly, orchestras are suffering the most. This has left many suggesting that we need new models for running arts organizations and others looking for draconian cuts.
What better site to explore the shifting modes of perception and the drastic transformations in our experience of time and space than the largely abandoned administrative facilities of the James A. Farley Post Office and future home of Moynihan Station?
The research for the film began to have an effect on me. Pretty soon, I found myself having trouble falling asleep. As I replayed certain events that had been revealed to me over and over in my head, I began to see images from my own childhood.
While Shirley Jones did none of the scooping some performers rely on late in their careers, her hit-and-miss approach to many phrases was the aural equivalent of watching a pilot try to land a plane in strong crosswinds. No skid marks, but many moments of alarm and uncertainty.
To prosper as an artist, career counselors to visual artists continually advise that one has to devote as much serious attention to the business aspects of this work as creating it. To some people, the business part of art may take precedence over anything else.
Today, the communal lifestyles of Jews are evolving and changing unlike anything in the last several centuries. Many synagogues and community centers are scrambling to figure out how to connect to a younger generation that is more transient and globally minded than ever before.
There is a reason that every graphic software has "brush" tools: it is because technology is trying very, very hard to emulate the subtlety of expression that only a physical brush applied a human hand to actual materials can truly offer.
This is the first major New York revival of Jonson's masterwork Volpone in 50 years, and it's staged with flair. What's better than seeing the amoral rich get their comeuppance?
An intellectual always wants to craft a clear and truthful work, one that presents their ideas in the best possible light, even if it means endless revamps and tweaks.
For Broadway, it isn't so much about a specific voice -- let's call it the Marketing Mamet Effect -- rather it's a tone that drives social strategy.
Despite great odds, dance remains a vibrant, meaningful and diverse form of cultural expression in many Native communities throughout the Americas.
My previous history with The Flea Theater's commitment to the various periods and themes of their plays already had me looking forward to Restoration Comedy. I'm happy to say that The Bats and the artistic personnel at The Flea surpassed my high expectations.
More neuroscientists, psychologists, educators and others are finding that the arts help nurture the right hemisphere of the brain, and is exactly what the more left brained curriculum needs to create the new thinking skills leading to creativity.
A poetry row in the UK last month led to a victory for verse in the country's public schools when the UK's Department of Education awarded a half million pound grant (about $800,000) to the "Poetry by Heart" national recitation competition.
Instead of simplistic, romantic notions of war draped in patriotic glory, the listener encounters a more difficult and nuanced 20th-century musical landscape of existential questions, gruesome descriptions, defiant submissions and cold dissonance.
Electric guitars are, visually, far and away the most arresting and varied instruments in the world. The electric guitar is the most ubiquitous instrument on the planet. Whether you're in deepest Serbia, Thailand, Peru, Greenland, if there is popular contemporary music being played, homegrown even, you will hear an electric guitar.
Rev. Amy Ziettlow, 2012.10.12
Bruce Weinstein, 2012.10.12
Nancy Cohen-koan, 2012.10.12